Quick Tip: Fixing a Flickering PowerPoint

This quick tip is for a very spe­cific sit­u­a­tion, but I want to make it avail­able since lengthy Googling didn’t turn up an answer for me. I had to solve it the hard way: by actu­ally pay­ing atten­tion. I’m not used to doing that. Google has made me weak.

The Prob­lem

When I ran a par­tic­u­lar Pow­er­Point in pre­sen­ta­tion mode nearly all of the slides blinked (on, black, on) at least once. Many blinked two or even three times before set­tling down. This also made advanc­ing through the slideshow ago­niz­ingly slow.

The Futile Search

Search­ing turned up lots of solu­tions to a sim­i­lar but unre­lated prob­lem. I’m not going to describe that Other Prob­lem here because if I did, I’d need to add some key­words that would lead peo­ple to this page who had the Other Prob­lem. But if you’re curi­ous about The Prob­lem Which Shall Not Be Named, you can read about it here and here.

The Cause

Then I noticed this lit­tle speaker icon in the lower right cor­ner of most slides:

It’s there for a rea­son: I recorded nar­ra­tion for the slides sev­eral months ago, though I no longer use the nar­ra­tion. The audio files were long gone.

But, curi­ously, the slides that flick­ered were the ones before slides with lit­tle speakers.

Then it clicked: when you’re on a given slide, Pow­er­Point pre-loads the next slide so it can show it quickly when you advance the pre­sen­ta­tion. The screen was flick­er­ing when Pow­er­Point tried to access the miss­ing audio files. I assume this flick­er­ing will hap­pen for any miss­ing audio file, whether it’s related to nar­ra­tion or not.

The Solu­tion

I deleted the speaker icon, remov­ing the audio from the slide:

Poof. Prob­lem solved.